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Death Stranding: A New Digital Ecology, Jordan Long

Theses and Dissertations

This essay analyzes Death Stranding, the 2019 release from contemporary game auteur Hideo Kojima. Here, I discuss the unique potentialities of this game world, detailing the ways in which Death Stranding expresses ecological perspectives. Asynchronous multiplayer serves as a unique metagame, helping to prove that play is a process of action which facilitates ecological thinking. The world of Death Stranding is filled with strange objects. The nonhuman entities that the player encounters throughout the game, for example, seem entirely alien. And yet, when these entities are properly understood, we realize that their inclusion is necessary--and natural. Your "job" in the …